AI/acc — inaugural post
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AI for accelerationism and accelerationism for AI.
AI/acc Manifesto coming soon!
CC: @kourouklides, @kleitos14, @Neurosyncretic_, @goldErebus, @jakobdylanc, monkerrr
Malware everywhere, this time Arch Linux users were the target of malicious packages:
"It was bad enough when finding out more than 400 AUR packages for Arch Linux users had been infected with malware but now that number has risen to around 900 a few hours ago and now in the end at more than 1,500 user-contributed packages."
California universities dropped the SAT to help low-income and minority students. The policy is doing the opposite, writes Svetlana Jitomirskaya, a professor of mathematics at UC Berkeley. https://t.co/a9NdfZK9DC
Another Berkeley professor told the author:
“In my second-year engineering class, a student asked me to explain why 1/2 + 1/3 = 5/6…. The lecture had to stop while I explained fractions.”
FROM THE ARCHIVE: "Age verification as a Trojan Horse for Digital ID"
We and others have been warning about this for years
Join us and push back #together
https://t.co/THJ1WCxjeg
If you want to keep your children off of social media, it's quite simple.
- Don't give them a smartphone.
- Implement parental controls on your router at home (they work).
And that's it.
Government action only makes it less likely for parents to take responsibility.
CHINA ELIMINATES 12,000 ‘OBSOLETE’ UNIVERSITY DEGREES IN PUSH TO PREPARE FOR THE AI ERA
CHINESE UNIVERSITIES SCRAP 12,000 DEGREE PROGRAMS AS AI RESHAPES JOB MARKET DEMANDS
There now appears to be close to 900 packages, in the Arch Linux User Repository (AUR) which contain malicious code (including keyloggers).
Which means we are closing in on 1% of the entire AUR containing deliberately malicious code.
META IS AN ABSOLUTE MESS INSIDE RIGHT NOW
Wired just dropped an exclusive, and the details are wild.
This week someone interrupted a livestreamed Meta meeting, open to thousands of employees, with an expletive-filled rant about "being the company's bitch." They told the presenters to find a specific Meta AI executive and "tell him that he's a piece of shit."
A presenter covered their face with their hands. Employees in the chat called the start "spicy."
Here is what's behind it.
Meta's AI restructuring cut 8,000 jobs last month, 10% of the company. The same restructuring feeds a unit called Applied AI, where 6,500 engineers and product managers have been drafted in waves since April. There is no application process. You get selected, and your options are join or leave the company. Members call themselves "draftees."
The new job: writing puzzles and coding problems to train Meta's AI models, two tasks a week. People hired to build apps for billions of users now assemble training data for hundreds of AI scientists.
"It's literally the gulag," one employee told WIRED. "You have zero purpose in life all of a sudden, you barely interact with anyone, you just have these tasks every week."
Another: "Most people find the work soul-crushing."
At the same time, Meta started recording US employees' clicks and keystrokes to generate more AI training data. Over 1,600 employees signed a petition demanding it stop. The concession: employees can pause the tracking for up to 30 minutes.
Zuckerberg's response came in an internal memo Friday: "We've made mistakes and will almost certainly make more." He repeated his promise of no more mass layoffs this year. His fixes: limits on the manager ratios Meta had deliberately pushed to 50-to-1 on some teams, bigger budgets for team events, a hackathon next month, and assigned desks by the end of the year.
That same memo says Meta's north star is "to be the best place for the most talented people in the world to make an impact."
The most talented people in the world are writing puzzles for a model and asking permission to pause the keystroke logger.
META declined to comment.
Keir Starmer uses auto-deleting WhatsApp messages.
He is also pushing a law that bans under-16s from using auto-deleting messages.
Privacy for me.
Surveillance for thee.
The British NGO sector understands that, once a ban is in place, American companies are going to shrug, say, “sorry, the UK isn’t our problem anymore,” and millions will access via VPN as Americans.
The UK safety lobby, having gotten everything it asked for, will lose power
@eigenron American citizenship for a European is usually a bug, not a feature because of IRS.
It’s a feature mostly for people from Third-World shithole countries.